Coming back to tech after a two-year break for caregiving. DoorDash was one of the first companies to give me a full loop, and the behavioral round surprised me. Wanted to write this up because the behavioral component gets way less attention than the coding/design posts.
DoorDash has six core values they publish publicly. I'd read them as marketing language before my interview. In the actual interview, they felt much more literal. Questions were tied pretty directly to specific values: efficiency, ownership, going beyond your role. The question was never "tell me about your values" but the framing of the stories they wanted clearly mapped to them.
Questions I was actually asked (paraphrased): Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with incomplete information. What did you do and how did you communicate it? Describe a project where you identified a problem that wasn't technically your responsibility. What did you do? Walk me through a time you pushed back on a direction from leadership. What was the outcome? Tell me about a time you had to move fast and didn't have time to get it perfect.
The last one caught me a little off guard. DoorDash is fast-moving and I think they're checking for comfort with calculated risk and not-perfect solutions. Coming back after a gap, I had to frame a caretaking decision I made under time pressure as a leadership/judgment story. That worked fine. Don't overthink the domain if the behavior maps.
Format: One dedicated behavioral round, 45 minutes, two interviewers from different functions (mine was a PM and an eng manager). They went back and forth, pretty comfortable. Asked follow-ups on my answers.
Prep: STAR structure is the right skeleton but your stories need a real decision moment, not just a situation. What was the actual call you made, and why? That's what they pushed on. "We decided as a team" isn't good enough.
Happy to answer questions below.